Children of Paradise: A Novel (38 page)

With her eyes locked on her leader’s, and her alternating visuals of the captain and her mother adrift on the
Coffee
, the theater of clotheslines, and the walk with her mother among falling helicopter seeds, Trina tries to keep each breath calm, not too labored a draw on the air, but a gentle outpouring as from a ladle into a jug with her long neck and body. In that way Trina’s mind remains alert and she stays upright. Both creatures make a U-turn in the crook at Trina’s elbows and pause as if to get their bearings and amble methodically back along her forearms, tapping with their front feet to test the soundness of the soft terrain until they reach her palms.

The preacher gestures for assistance and Nora and Dee bring the boxes and hold them under Trina’s palms and the preacher tilts her hands in a swift move and the tarantula and the scorpion drop into the boxes and Nora and Dee are only too happy to snap the lids shut. Trina remains on the spot with her arms outstretched and the preacher grabs her and holds her close to him and kisses her and everyone applauds. Joyce clambers out of her row, and encouraged by everyone, even the guards, she rushes to the front of the assembly and climbs onto the stage, and Nora, Dee, and Pat move to block her path but the preacher waves them away and she runs to Trina and the preacher includes Joyce in his embrace.

—People, faith comes in all shapes and sizes, and tonight you have seen a giant demonstration of faith from Trina.

The continuous applause and repetitions of amen and praise the Lord reverberate for an age and several people faint and are fanned and fed water to revive them.

—Suffer the little children . . . the reverend begins and trails off and the congregation picks up the rest of the verse in a loud and enthusiastic recitation, not quite synchronized, filling the assembly with an air of hypnosis.

Three rows from the stage, a squeamish teenager believes the hairs on his legs stirred by a gust really must be a scorpion and the young man leaps straight up from his seat and shouts the words “scorpion” and “blouse” without even a glance to be sure and the people around him take him at his word and leap from their seats as well and rush, scrambling over one another, each person convinced of the scorpion by the last person’s response to the person before in a chain of panic that results in pandemonium that the guards themselves succumb to by lashing with sticks at any dark patch on the ground. Only the preacher’s voice over the microphone slows the scramble sufficiently for the guards to begin to hit people rather than dark patches, and only after hearing the preacher plead with them for order does the crowd stop and look at him.

Nora approaches the preacher and whispers in his ear. He pulls back from his assistant and looks at her and leans forward again and offers his other ear so that she can tell him her message a second time. He walks over to the guards and tells them to meet him at his house right away. But first he walks down the center aisle and hugs and kisses as many people as he can reach. He pauses twice to launch a verse from the Bible and leave the group to finish it among themselves as he propels himself toward the back exit with more embraces and kisses and more snippets of verse to inspire his followers. His assistants leave the stage by a side exit and run around the outside of the tent and meet him at the back, along with two armed guards. They hurry to the main house, ablaze with more lights than any other building apart from the bakery.

Once inside the front door, he curses and summons the guards who chased the girl. As the doctor and a nurse stitch his wrist at an improvised sterile station set up on a table, he has the guards recount the exact details of their report that the girl jumped into the well. Did they see her jump? Have they found a body? What makes them conclude that this is the most likely action taken by the girl? He fires his questions and does not wait for answers. The guards shrug and glance at each other.

—So, my trusty guardians, you know these people here.

He sweeps his arms to take in his assistants and two guards, and the search party follows his sweeping gesture.

—How come they searched the same well with lights and found nothing?

The guards who chased the girl swear there must be some mistake, since the child ran toward the well and she screamed as if pitched to the bottom of it. They say she disappeared after her screams cut short and echoed. One guard says they could see her ahead of them until they reached the well. Another guard suggests that she sank to the bottom of the little amount of water that remains in the well.

Nora shakes her head:

—No, we lowered a prefect on a rope with lights and a stick, and he found nothing but rancid water and cobwebs.

The preacher lifts his arms above his head for quiet. He pauses for a moment and speaks in the most even tone he can muster:

—There’s a child out there and we need to find her before our erstwhile delegation arrives and don’t tell me she might be killed by a panther, jaguar, or boa constrictor, or she can’t get far in the dark. No more ifs and buts, just find her and bring her here to me tonight. Now get out.

He asks Pat to stay with him, and after almost everyone clears the front room and leaves the house or moves to the kitchen or the back rooms, he slumps into his favorite armchair with the leg rest and asks her to give him something to calm his nerves, which he says are about to break. Pat rolls up his sleeves and flicks a syringe and injects his arm. Next she maneuvers to the back of the armchair and massages the man’s temples, and he hums for a short while, and his head lolls to one side as he slides into a stupor.

A child in a blind sprint in pitch dark, swatting at her shoulder, neck, and torso, soon runs out of breath and risks running at full pelt into something. Suppose this something looks as dark as night, weighs four hundred–plus pounds, and squeezes through a tunnel dug under its cage and catches that child in its arms just as she scrambles over the retaining wall of the well. In her rush to stop the sensation of something crawling all over her skin, almost under her skin, she tries to dive into that well and end everything.

Her screams from the tent and her mad exit alert Adam, who is stationed at his usual spot, listening to the sermon over the loudspeakers and swaying to the songs of the congregation. Adam sees the girl in distress and the guards in search of her and he dashes to the back of his cage, determined to help her, no matter the consequence. He squeezes into the tunnel he has dug over several days, careful all that time to spread the dirt around his cage and fling some of it between the bars into the grass, and he emerges out of his cage. His eyes know the dark. His mind pictures the well and the terrain around it, and he runs to that place to intercept the girl. He reaches her as she clambers over the side of the well, and he grabs her, covers her mouth, and runs with her to the perimeter of the compound. She passes out. He follows the fence to one of several gates dotted along it. He holds the girl under his left arm and slightly behind him to keep her safe from the impact, and he breaks through the fence post by dipping his right shoulder and throwing his weight against it.

In his dreams he flies through this forest unimpeded. In this dark he takes the nearest path down to the river. The prefect wakes and Adam covers her mouth and moves his hand away slowly and she tries to scream and he covers her mouth again and once more moves it away and this third time she remains quiet. She shrinks from him, but he grips her around the waist.

The guards, charged with finding the girl, comb the area and widen their search until they include Adam’s cage and think he must be asleep in it, but as a formality of their search they shine torches at his bed and find nothing and inspect the entire cage and, to be doubly sure, unlock it and, with sticks and guns ready for any surprise, reach Adam’s bed and come upon the large hole against the back wall of the cage. They sound the alarm with the permission of Nora, Dee, and Pat. They decide not to wake the preacher from his sedation. Pat says it would be unwise to give him such bad news in his drowsy condition. He cannot hear the alarm in his deep sleep, and it is important to get the entire commune to help with the search, since Adam must be somewhere on the property, hiding in a corner.

T
hirst wakes the preacher. Mouth dry as caked cotton wool and head groggy, he calls for drink as if a drink might come rushing, but no one responds. Always two guards at their station at the front door and Nora, Dee, and Pat milling about the house. He opens the front door to the entire commune rushing about left and right and shouts to the nearest person to tell him what is going on, has everyone gone mad in the night? Only one guard is in the yard at the front of the house with his rifle poised and swinging it in all directions as if he expects to be attacked from all quarters. The reverend lifts his arms questioningly.

—Reverend, Adam’s gone.

—What do you mean, gone? Where can a fucking half-ton gorilla go? Pat! Dee! Nora!

He feels wobbly on his feet and leans on the porch railing for balance. He staggers down the steps and crosses the area between his house and Adam’s cage. A second guard rushes forward to join the first, and they accompany the preacher. The cage is unlocked, gate open. The preacher walks into it and shouts for Adam. Pat runs to him and he leans on her and asks her what happened. She shows him the hole next to Adam’s bed. This new piece of evidence makes the preacher alert. He pushes his assistant from him and curses.

A few more guards arrive on the scene. The preacher says if the gorilla can dig a hole and disappear around the same time as the girl, then there must be a connection. He says if they find Adam, they will solve the mystery of the disappeared girl. No one around the preacher believes him. Pat thinks he must be speaking under the influence of the narcotic. The guards cannot square the beast they are accustomed to seeing in the cage with any demonstrable intelligence that extends to an intervention of the kind described by the preacher. The notion that Adam escaped from his cage and took the child with him and that he performed his escape undetected by digging a hole under the noses of the guards and everyone else seems too much, too fast, for them to process.

The reverend invites them to think about it, then not to think about it but leave the thinking to him and just do as he asks—find the gorilla and they will find the girl. He suggests a plan for the search, but a guard interrupts him with a report that there is a breach in a side gate and it looks like it was made by a powerful animal of some kind. The preacher says with a degree of triumph in his voice: That spot is as good a place as any to begin your search, gentlemen. He says Adam is no ordinary gorilla and he should not be harmed in any way. They should use tranquilizers to subdue him. The preacher falls to one knee and the guards are about to copy his action, thinking he wants to pray, but Pat asks two guards to help her carry the reverend back to the house.

Joyce and Trina take the opportunity of the confusion at the commune to find each other and head for the pig farm. The path is dark and they hope nothing else roams on the trail. They hold hands with a tight grip and stay close to each other. After two hundred paces, Joyce stoops and feels in the bush and picks up the two sticks she placed there in the weeks of planning. She gives the smaller of the two sticks to Trina. At another four hundred paces, Joyce turns left, and after another four hundred, they find the drain that leads down the slope to the landing pier.

On their way down the slope, they hear the grunts and think it might be a wild boar. They raise their sticks, and the plan is to strike them together and make as much noise as they can. But Trina recognizes the grunts as something other than a boar and tells her mother things will be fine now. Joyce asks Trina what she means by her declaration. Trina says that grunting can belong to only one creature, the one who carried her when she fainted and covered her with his blanket so that she might sleep and be safe near his cage.

Joyce cannot believe her ears, but she knows not to argue with her daughter anymore. Mother and daughter creep out of the bush, and there is Adam shielding the young prefect with his body and baring his teeth and grunting at them. Adam spots Trina and releases the girl and bounds toward her. Joyce raises her stick, but Trina pulls her mother’s arm down and drops her stick and opens her arms and Adam sweeps her up into his embrace. The prefect runs to Joyce and the two of them watch Trina and Adam hugging each other. Adam turns his back and Trina scratches it. Trina bows her head toward Adam and he ruffles her hair. They do this a few times.

A guard shouts that they should put their hands up and step away from Adam. A second guard repeats the order and warns them they will be shot if they do not obey immediately. Adam tenses to charge at the two men but Trina stands in front of Adam and says no, very firmly and with pleading in her voice. Adam keeps still for her. Joyce holds the prefect and calls to Trina to come to her. The two guards walk closer and both aim at Adam. They order Trina to step away from Adam. Joyce recognizes them.

—Kevin, Eric. Don’t do this.

—We have our orders.

—Don’t obey mad orders from a madman. Leave us. Search somewhere else.

Kevin asks Joyce please not to say another word and get herself and her daughter into trouble and to obey his instructions. Eric says they have no choice but to return to the compound. No good can come from seeking the life they abandoned. Kevin tells Eric to take a shot if he can. Joyce begs them to wait. Eric orders Trina to move away from Adam, but she refuses to move.

—Trina, my gun has tranquilizing darts. Adam won’t be harmed.

Kevin says only his gun carries live ammunition and he will use it if Eric’s darts fail. Best to give him a clear shot. They should listen and come back to the commune. Adam looks at Trina and Joyce for direction. He can reach the men in a few paces and put an end to the argument. But Trina or Joyce needs to instruct him. Kevin promises that neither he nor Eric will say anything about the dissent if Joyce gets Trina to cooperate. But they must do so without delay, since other guards will soon arrive. Joyce turns and looks at the river. There is nothing on the water but a layer of darkness. She half-expects to see a rainbow boat materialize on the water in the wake of that harvest and gather Trina, the prefect, Adam, and her into it and disappear from this place. But the surface of the river keeps still for the first light to pick the dark from it.